Jack Werber, 92, Saved Hundredsat Death Camp

November 24, 2006|By Dennis Hevesi the New York Times

Jack Werber, a Holocaust survivor who helped save more than 700 children at the Buchenwald slave labor camp in the last months of World War II, then prospered after arriving in the United States by manufacturing coonskin caps during the Davy Crockett craze of the mid-1950s, died on Nov. 18. He was 92 and lived in Great Neck, N.Y.

The cause was a heart attack, his son Martin said.

Mr. Werber, a son of a Jewish furrier from the Polish town of Radom, was the barracks clerk at Buchenwald in August 1944 when a train carrying 2,000 prisoners arrived, many of them young boys. By then, with the Russians advancing into Germany, the number of Nazi guards at the camp had been reduced. Working with the camp's underground -- and with the acquiescence of some guards fearful of their fate after the war -- Werber helped save most of the boys from transport to death camps by hiding them in the barracks.

During a trip to Israel in 1999, Mr. Werber's efforts were acknowledged by Israel Meir Lau, a former chief rabbi of Israel and one of the boys Werber saved.

In 1996, with Professor William Helmreich, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College, Werber wrote "Saving Children: Diary of a Buchenwald Survivor and Rescuer." In it, he wrote, "Suffering a great personal loss drove me in my obsession to save children."

That loss was the knowledge that his first wife, Rachel, and their 3-year-old daughter, Emma, had been killed by the Nazis.

"It's clear that some Nazi guards knew what the underground was doing," Helmreich said. "They knew there would be trials and said, `Remember that I did this for you.'"

Soon after arriving in the United States in 1946, Mr. Werber and a cousin started a company that made novelty items like fur coats for dolls and pompoms for ice skates. By the mid-1950s, the Disney television show, starring Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, had little boys all over America clamoring for a coonskin cap.

Mr. Werber's company was not the only one to seize on the fad. "So many hats were being made that it was hard to get raccoon fur," Martin Werber said. "Dad came up with an idea: a plastic patch covering the top, sort of like a yarmulke, with the fur around it."